Thursday, May 9, 2013

I first learned about
the short film Cajuns of the Teche, directed by André de LaVarre and released in August 1942 by Columbia Pictures, while researching my book The Cajuns: Americanization of a People. This find occurred by accident in the late 1990s, while looking for something else in the National Archives and Records Administration. (Serendipity often happens when I’m conducting
historical research. I think it’s a perfectly
valid form of discovery.)

Title cards from Cajuns of the Teche.
(Screen grabs by author)

In short, a reel of
film labeled Cajuns of the Teche sat
in the National Archives and had not yet been dubbed to videotape (much less
had it been digitized; that technology was not yet at hand for most people). A student at the time, I didn’t have the $250
or so that the National Archives wanted to transfer the film to video, so I
contacted my friend, Lafayette attorney Warren A. Perrin. Back then Warren served as president of the
Council for the Development of French in Louisiana and owned, as he still does,
the Acadian Museum in his hometown of Erath.

Warren agreed to fund
the film’s transfer to video through his museum, so I filled out the pertinent paperwork,
mailed it off, waited, and a few weeks later a VHS dub arrived from Washington, D.C. I watched the film, found it delightful, but ultimately
did not use it as research material for my book. Moving on to other projects, I forgot about
the dub for about fifteen years, but recently pulled it out of my files and digitized
it so that I can present it here:

(Click to play video)

Two thoughts come to
mind when I watch Cajuns of the Teche:
First, after seventy years the images are crisp, clear, well-composed, and in
my opinion extremely valuable as a record of the Teche region around World War
II; second, the narration is often extremely misleading and in some instances
downright wrong.

I’ll catalog these
misleading and incorrect claims. The narrator
repeatedly refers to the Cajuns’ ancestors as “Arcadians,” when the proper term
is “Acadian.” Moreover, the Acadians did
not arrive in Louisiana when it was “a colony of the kingdom of France,” as the
narrator asserts, but a colony of Spain (albeit one administered for a time by French
caretakers — Spain only slowly assumed full control of the formerly French
colony).

The scenes of grandiose
“Cajun homes” (see timestamps 3:19, 4:45 and 5:13 to 5:21 on the video) never fail to elicit
snickers from other Cajuns to whom I’ve shown the film privately. The narration is entirely misleading when it
states, “In the past we built many grand and spacious mansions, for our
families were large and our attendants were many.” The dwellings in the film were far too
luxurious for average, ordinary Cajuns, most of whom lived as subsistence
farmers — and who certainly did not have many “attendants” (apparently a
euphemism for “slaves”). Granted, a very
few “genteel Acadians” managed to rise to positions of wealth in antebellum south Louisiana — mainly sugar planters with enslaved workforces —
but they were the exception, not the rule.

Not a Cajun house.
(Screen grab by author)

In addition, the
narration refers to the Louisiana colony as “a land with freedom of religion.” While it is true that the Acadians freely
practiced their Catholic faith in Spanish-held Louisiana — the Spanish, after
all, were Catholics, too — the colony was hardly a bastion of religious
toleration. The Spanish, for example, forbid Protestants from holding public
worship and they expelled all Jews from the colony.

The “Cajun garden”
shown in the film at 5:27 — featuring a centuries-old Buddha statue, if one
looks closely enough — is actually Jungle Gardens, owned and operated by
Scots-Irish Tabasco sauce manufacturer E. A. McIlhenny (hardly a Cajun).

Some of the narration
is drivel. I do not believe, as claimed
at 9:47 in the film, that an appreciation of “fine silks and soft satins”
represented “one of the strongest traits of French heritage” among Cajun
girls. Equally nonsensical is the
narrator’s reference at 5:55 — made over the image of fancifully dressed Cajun men
and girls enjoying an elegant ring dance — to “slippered
steps of old Acadia.” Acadian men and
woman alike generally wore moccasins, living as they did on the rugged North
American frontier.

Fortunately, the images themselves are infinitely more valuable than the narration. This is not to say that some of the images
are not misleading. For example, the
Norman milkmaid costumes worn in the film by some Cajun girls and women (0:45
and 8:05) were unknown to their Acadian ancestors. An example of what anthropologists and other
scholars call “fakelore,” these costumes were probably introduced to more
upwardly mobile Cajuns through mass-produced, illustrated volumes of Longfellow’s
epic poem Evangeline (which follows
the fate of an Acadian maiden exiled to south Louisiana). I say “upwardly mobile” because the mass of
ordinary Cajuns never read Evangeline.

Circa 1890 depiction of Evangeline.
(Colorized by author)

Criticism aside (at
last, you say), I made these other observations while watching Cajuns of the Teche:

The shot of boats moored along a bayou (1:43) seems to show some other waterway besides the Teche, perhaps Bayou Lafourche. I could be wrong — perhaps it is the Teche.

The stern-wheeler shown
early in the film (1:50), the V. J.
Kurzweg, is despite its appearance not
a steamboat. As Carl A. Brasseaux writes
in Steamboats on Louisiana’s Bayous, the
Kurzweg “is widely — albeit
inaccurately — remembered along Bayou Teche as one of the stream’s last
steamboats,” but it “was not technically a steamboat” because “it was propelled
by diesel motors.” Note the Kurzweg has no towering twin smokestacks
as found on most steamboats: as a diesel-powered vessel it did not require
them.

The V. J. Kurzweg on Bayou Teche, ca. 1942.
(Screen grab by author)

The fishermen at 2:35
do not seem to be on Bayou Teche, but rather in a cypress swamp. (A bayou is a slow-moving, muddy, usually
smallish river, while a swamp is a wooded wetland.) If I had to guess, I would say the swamp in
question is the Atchafalaya, if only because of its proximity to the
Teche. But there are many patches of
swamp in the region that are not in the Atchafalaya. In any event, the swamp in the film was
clearly experiencing a flood, as indicated by the swift current.

Sugar cane field workers in Cajuns of the Teche.
(Screen grab by author)

Another scene depicts a mounted white overseer (3:55) supervising a work crew as it weeds young sugarcane shoots. I cannot tell if the work crew is black or white or both. A shot of three male field workers reveals one with black hands (also 3:55), but work gloves mask the race of the other two workers. A wide shot appears to show two white female field workers at far left (4:13). The other field workers in the shot, however, cannot be seen clearly enough to establish their races.

It is tempting to draw a lesson about race or race relations from this scene. But it is impossible to do so without really knowing the workers’ racial makeup. Regardless, the shot does illustrate the region’s dependence on manual field labor in 1942. It would take the ongoing war and resulting labor shortages to spur south Louisiana agriculture to mechanize. What I observed about rural Lafayette Parish in The Cajuns no doubt held true for much of Cajun Louisiana: Despite the findings of a 1942 survey “that ‘tractors are not thought to be necessary or even desirable,’” Lafayette parish farmers “had almost universally adopted mechanization within a decade. ‘The old days of the plow and the horse are gone,’ observed a 1951 survey.”

A ring dance on the banks of the Teche.
(Screen grab by author)

The reference to “giant
spiders” (4:09) alludes to the legend of the Durand wedding, which allegedly occurred
at Oak and Pine Alley on the outskirts of St. Martinville. As journalist Jim Bradshaw records:

It was only to be
expected that [Durand] would throw the finest wedding ever when two of his
daughters decided to get married on the same day. . . . [A]s the romantic
legend is told, he ordered a million spiders sent from China and sent couriers
to California to fetch hundreds of pounds of silver and gold dust. (A less
romantic version of the story says the spiders came from nearby Catahoula Lake,
but I like the China version better.) . . . Shortly before the wedding day, the
spiders were set loose to spin millions of yards of delicate webs among the
limbs of the oak and pine alley. On the morning of the wedding, servants armed
with bellows filled with the silver and gold dust sprayed the cobweb canopy to
set it glittering in the sunlight like something from a fairy tale.

Of this legend Brasseaux states, “Most
southern Louisianians are familiar with the
stories of the spiders imported from China for the Oak and Pine Alley wedding.” Yet it along with similar local legends, he notes, have been “proven unfounded by recent historical research.” (To Bradshaw’s credit, he concurs with
Brasseaux that the story is a legend.)

Elsewhere, the narrator
observes (6:08) “We Cajuns speak French among ourselves, and some of our
children do not learn English until they reach the classroom.” Where
they will have the French whipped out of them, I thought. I was being only slightly facetious, for
south Louisiana educators often punished Cajun children for speaking French at
school. More than any other factor, this
practice accounted for the rapid decline of Cajun French during the early to
mid-twentieth century. (See my previous blog article about tracking this decline.)

Quilters with garde-soleils.
(Screen grab by author)

Finally, although the
Cajuns’ dress is not “authentic” (that is, historically accurate) in the spinning
wheel scene at the beginning or in the ring dance scene, the clothing shown in
other scenes does strike me as authentic.
See, for example, the field workers (Cajun or otherwise) shown from 3:55 to 4:29; and the school children from 6:05 to 6:24. (Note the students in question attended an
all-white school: segregation did not end in much of Louisiana until 1969 —
about fifteen years after the U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education struck down separate-but-equal schooling
nationwide.) See also the churchgoers at
6:38 and 6:45; the corn husk weavers at 7:05; and the quilters at 7:42
(complete with their garde-soleils,
or sunbonnets). In addition, see the
weaver at right, but not at left, at 8:04, and, conversely, the same weaver at
left, but not at right, at 8:10; and the wedding goers at the end of the film
(9:40 onwards). The apparel in these
scenes looks very authentic to me. Perhaps
the subjects had no time or compulsion to dress for the camera?

Horse and buggies leaving Cajun wedding.
(Screen grab by author)

Now to address an issue
other than the film’s accuracy: Was the film wartime propaganda?

I found Cajuns of the Teche in the National Archives collection of the U.S.
Information Agency (USIA). Founded in
1953 during the Cold War and still active today, the USIA, as its website notes,
“explains and supports American foreign policy and promotes U.S. national
interests through a wide range of overseas information programs . . . [and]
promotes mutual understanding between the United States and other nations by
conducting educational and cultural activities.” Created prior to the advent of the USIA, Cajuns of the Teche sat in a section of the USIA collection regarding an earlier organization, the
U.S. Office of War Information (OWI). Established
in 1942, the OWI, as the Library of Congress explains, “served as an important
U.S. government propaganda agency during World War II.”

Logos of the USIA and the OWI.

Why would a travelogue
film issued by Columbia Pictures be found in a collection pertaining to the
OWI?

The answer might be
found in a pictorial “feature” (pre-packaged photo essay for overseas consumption)
issued by the OWI in 1944 and titled “The Bayou French of Louisiana.” This feature consisted of a four-page
typewritten essay about the Cajuns along with many captioned black-and-white
still images. These photos depicted “everyday”
Cajun culture, activities, and places.

Intriguingly, at least four of these black-and-white still
images depict events also shown in Cajuns of the Teche. Moreover, these
black-and-white images were clearly shot at the exact same moment as the corresponding
images in the film — albeit from slightly different angles. See the below image
comparisons: Those at left are “screen
grabs” from Columbia Pictures’ Cajuns
of the Teche, while those at right are still images from the OWI's “The
Bayou French of Louisiana.” As you can
see, the paired images are almost identical (click to enlarge):

The OWI’s “The Bayou
French of Louisiana” was clearly wartime propaganda. Its purpose was to show overseas audiences how
American society could support an ethnically heterogeneous population, yet
still be undeniably “American.” As the
OWI essay accompanying the images put it, “The persistence of Cajun French
traditions in the United States, as those of other national groups, is
encouraged in the belief that such diversity enriches and strengthens
democratic institutions. The various
population groups of the United States are encouraged to perpetuate their folkways
so that each may contribute to the homogenous but broadly variegated culture of
the United States.”

But was the earlier Cajuns of the Teche also wartime
propaganda?

The federal government
created the U.S. Office of War Information in June 1942; Columbia Pictures
issued Cajuns of the Teche the
next month. This would hardly seem enough time for the fledgling OWI to produce an eleven-minute film shot on
location in south Louisiana and to arrange for a major Hollywood studio to distribute it. And while
there are examples of the OWI and Columbia Pictures teaming up later to release wartime propaganda films (such as the 1943 film Troop
Train and the 1945 film The True
Glory), there is no known evidence of OWI involvement with Cajuns of the Teche.

Back of OWI print indicating when and
from whom it had been purchased.
(National Archives and Records Administration,
Washington, D.C.)

A key to understanding the actual, tenuous relationship between the OWI’s propagandistic “The Bayou French of Louisiana”
and Columbia Pictures’ Cajuns of the Teche may
be found on the back of the original B&W prints used with “The
Bayou French of Louisiana.” Data there indicates that the OWI licensed the
images from a commercial entity named “Screen
Traveler, from Gendreau.” Presumably a stock photo vendor, Screen Traveler may have sent a photographer to Louisiana in 1942
alongside Columbia Pictures’ film crew. This would explain why some of the images in Cajuns of the Teche and some of those in
“The Bayou French of Louisiana” correspond so closely.

Ultimately, I do not
believe — given the current evidence — that Cajuns of the Teche was a product of OWI wartime propaganda; but I
do believe that still photographs taken during the filming of Cajuns of the Teche ended up in
the wartime propaganda project “The Bayou French of Louisiana.” I make this assertion because we know
for certain that the OWI, a government entity charged with producing wartime
propaganda, issued “The Bayou French of Louisiana

”; and we know that some of the images used in “The Bayou French of Louisiana

” closely match scenes in Cajuns of the Teche.

Still, the question
remains: why is there a reel of Cajuns of
the Teche in the OWI section of the USIA's archival collection?

About Me

Shane K. Bernard holds degrees in English and History from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and a doctorate in History from Texas A&M University. He is the author of several books on south Louisiana history and culture. Shane lives in New Iberia, Louisiana, a short distance from the celebrated Bayou Teche.